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I just wanted to sum up the most mundane facts for you.The moral argumentation is just one more means to an end, aweapon used in much the same way as lies. This is the world thatmen have made, and it would make me want to be a woman-if onlywomen did not love men!

Perhaps it was these sad colours, or perhaps it was the wan, exhausted light of the afternoon sun, drained of its strength by the haze: there was something indifferent, lifeless, and mechanical about objects and human beings here, as though they were all part of a scene in a puppet-theatre.

I just wanted to sum up the most mundane facts for you.The moral argumentation is just one more means to an end, aweapon used in much the same way as lies. This is the world thatmen have made, and it would make me want to be a woman-if onlywomen did not love men!

In the country, he thought, the gods still come to people. A man matters, his experiences matter, but in the city, where experiences come by the thousands, we can no longer relate them to ourselves; and this is of course the beginning of life’s notorious turning into abstraction.

But even as he thought all this, he was also aware of how this abstraction extended a man’s power a thousandfold and how, even if from the point of view of any given detail it diluted him tenfold, as a whole it expanded him a hundredfold, and there could be no question of turning the wheel backward.

There was a lot of rereading for me (Infinite Jest, V, Mao II, Brave New World, Naked Lunch, Lord of Flies, The Trial, Swann’s Way, Crime and Punishment) and other side-stuff to do (a thesis on IP and philosophy courses) but still I managed to finally sink my teeth into a few great books. Here are short highlights:

Have you ever seen a dog?” he asked. “You only think you have. What you see is only something you feel more or less justified in regarding as a dog. It isn’t a dog in every respect, and always has some personal quality no other dog has.